Buying a home is one of the most important and expensive experiences in a person's life. It is also a very personal experience which is ultimately driven by a buyer's instincts and subjective preferences. There are many different types of available real estate and the home a person buys ultimately depends on the quality of information he or she is able to obtain prior to purchase.
Listings of available real estate are typically stored in a central computer system, generally referred to as a “multiple listing service”. This computer-stored listing may be accessed through terminals for retrieval of specific information relating to properties. However, searching the stored information is typically dependent on traditional attributes such as the number of bedrooms or bathrooms. While one may be searching for a house having certain attributes (e.g., 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms), those attributes alone provide little indication that a house satisfying that criteria will appeal to a buyer's more subjective preferences. The techniques currently used to search real estate listings are antiquated and largely ineffective for a number of potential real estate buyers.
Many times when looking at properties which satisfy the buyer's search criteria, the buyer does not even enter a number of properties because he or she can tell from their outward appearance or feel of the neighborhood that they are unsuitable. The need to physically visit each and every property in a market to determine whether they are suitable wastes the buyer's time and adds to the inefficiency of the home-buying experience.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to have a superior system and method for searching real estate listings.